What is employee experience and how it can affect your company

As I’ve noticed that there are quite a lot of people looking to grow their team lately, today I want to discuss with you about employee experience.

I’ve had some pretty terrible and amazing experiences during the last 9 years of my work experience and I think this subject might be very important and eye-opening for you.

So what is employee experience, how does it work and how can you kick ass at it?

Now let me make a small intro into the subject.

As the society evolved, amazing customer service became a “MUST”, even if still, even nowadays, there are people who still don’t get it.

Ever since forever, companies and especially small businesses let their customer service speak for their brands. That’s how people would stand out in front of their competitors, exactly like Gary V would describe in his “ The Thank you economy book”.

Kinda the same thing happened with attracting new talent and most importantly retaining it.

It’s all about everyone having an amazing experience, isn’t it?

Employee experience encapsulates what people encounter, observe or feel over the course of their employee journey in your company.

In more simple words, it’s basically how you treat them from the first moment then walk into your office and you have the first discussion, to what they experience in terms of culture and teamwork during the time they work with you, until you decide to go on separate paths.

Now, I know a lot of people don’t talk much about it, or “it wasn’t a priority for them”, but as the job market gets more and more competitive, at least thinking and starting doing something about your employee experience is a must.

The way people experience having a job or work, has changed tremendously.

If before having a job for 40 years was a good, safe thing to do, nowadays people don’t care about it anymore.

Now, besides all the perks that one can offer, as well as super interesting and dynamic jobs, retaining employees is probably harder than ever. Do people only want money, or is it more?

So how can you start?

First off think about what and how you would like people to experience your company. Think about who you are as an organisation, how’s your team or how you want your team to be and what values you want to promote.

Secondly, break it down into small steps:

1. Recruitment process.

How you recruit, who interviews people, how do you wow them when they first meet you

2. The onboarding process.

How do you make these people feel part of your team? What trainings are they going through, how many intro days do they have and are you offering lunch with a team or the CEO?

3. Make them feel at home.

Now at home per say, but make them feel that when they get to work, they are maybe as excited as when they go home.

And yes, I am talking about excitement here. Nothing ever should be boring, you should allow them to innovate, to be opened to all sorts of discussions, allow them to grow. What I mean is that don’t make them feel bored or complacent.

People nowadays want jobs with purpose.

4. Last but least, when they decide to part ways with you, try to understand why that happened.

And the point of all of this not to just have a feedback sheet to know why they left, but is to understand the WHY.

And from here its all and adventure of experiments, to see what actually works and doesn’t work for the specifics of your company.